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Manners and Customs of the Egyptians: Dodona

LII. Primitively, the Pelasgi, when praying, made offerings of all kinds to their gods, as I was told at Dodona, but they gave neither name nor surname to any one of them; for they had never heard any given to them. They called them gods for the sole reason that, after having put the universe in order, they maintained all its laws. Then, much time having elapsed, they learned from Egypt the names of gods other than Bacchus, and, a long time afterward, this last name too. They consulted the oracle of Dodona in relation to these names, that being the one which the Greeks consider the most ancient, and which, at that time, was the only one. When the Pelasgi had asked whether they should. accept names coming from the barbarians, the oracle replied "Take them!" Thereupon, they sacrificed to the gods under these names, of which they made use from that time forth, and, finally, the Greeks received the same from them. LIII. Whence came each of the gods? Have they always existed? What is the form of them? Nothing of all this was known, properly speaking, until a very recent period. For I think that Hesiod and Homer only four hundred years anterior to me, not more. Well, it was they who made up the Greek theogony; who gave names to the gods; who distributed honors and attributes among them; who de scribed their forms, and it appears to me that the poets said to have preceded those two men were born after them. LVIII. The oracle of Thebes in Egypt and that of Dodona APPENDIX. yield their responses in nearly the same manner. The art of prophesying from an inspection of the victims came also from Egypt. The Egyptians were the first of all men to establish solemn processions, holidays and offerings, and it is from them that the Greeks learned these ceremonies. This, for me, is proof of the fact: in Egypt it is plain that they are very ancient, and, in Greece that they have been but recently established.